I first met Rakefet Abergel at Nightmares Film Festival in 2017 after she appeared on a panel discussion about social progress in the horror genre. She was, perhaps, the most infectiously funny person I’d ever met.

She was also the most easily scared!

One evening, the festival had scare actors mixed in the crowd and when I looked over the railing from the upstairs lounge to discover who had let out the most fantastic scream downstairs, there was Rakefet, clutching her drink with her eyes closed as a menacing voodoo queen disappeared back into the crowd.

Months later, as I began putting messages out online that I was looking for a series of interviews for iHorror’s Horror Pride Month celebration, I got a message from Rakefet on Facebook.

“I’m one the of the Bs in LGBT,” she said. “but the B is silent.”

To say I was intrigued was an understatement. I was unaware when we met that she was a member of the LGBTQ community at all, but something more was there in that statement that I couldn’t put my finger on.

After a bit of a scheduling debacle, we finally manage to carve out time to chat about her experiences as a bisexual in the film industry and how, even after she included her bisexuality in her award-winning short thriller Jax in Love, no one seemed to notice.

Naturally, my first question in our interview was, “What do you mean the B is silent?”

“Well, it isn’t silent for me!” Abergel laughed. “I’m very open about who I am, but I feel like in the LGBTQ community the B is really silent. Sometimes it feels like the community doesn’t take us seriously.”

Suddenly, her previous statement not only made sense, but it seemed a heavy weight to carry, and as she went on to relate her experiences earlier in the life while touring with a lesbian comedy troupe, the weight of that statement grew even heavier.

She appeared on the tour, along with her wife whom she was in a relationship with for 13 years, when some of the other comedians began making snide remarks about how she didn’t really belong there because she talked openly about her bisexuality in her act.

Some of these women had lived their entire lives as straight, only coming out in their 40s and 50s after having husbands and children for years. And yet, they pointed their fingers at her as if she was the one who didn’t really belong.

“They didn’t want anyone to judge them,” she said, “but they were really good at handing out judgement themselves.”

Abergel took a lot of the frustration and pain she’d felt over the years and poured it into Jax in Love, creating a cold-blooded serial killer who just wants someone to return the love she’s so willing to give.

And yet, though Jax, who Abergel has won numerous awards for playing in the film, is attracted to both men and women, no one seems to bring it up at all.

“I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning it,” Abergel said. “That either means that it was done so normally that no one questioned it, or that aspect of the character was just ignored.”

I’d like to think it’s the former reason, and Abergel agreed that this normalized view was what she hoped for in the long run.

The film is quite terrifying as Jax can switch from “I love you” to “I’ll kill you” very quickly, and Abergel admits she was afraid she might be perpetuating the worst stereotype about the bisexual community.

“People, both straight and LGBT, will come right out and say things like ‘So, that means you’re attracted to everyone, right?'” Rakefet laughed. “And I’m like ‘Are you attracted to every man or woman in the world? No!'”

It’s a problem in every aspect of the film industry. Normalized portrayal of bisexual characters seems to be non-existent, and Abergel wondered what she might do in another film to help correct this.

She even joked that maybe the answer was aliens.

“Getting rid of all the boxes won’t happen until the aliens come,” she said. “There can only be two boxes then, and it’ll either be the alien box or the human box when they attack our asses. It’s what happens in every sci-fi/horror movie with aliens.”

I’d personally love to see what Abergel could do with that idea, but her next big film project will actually be a supernatural horror film about ghosts and possession with subtle hints of What Lies Beneath in its DNA, though she admitted she had not seen the Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfeiffer film herself.

As for future representation both within the horror genre and without, she said that she hopes that filmmakers will learn to portray the reality of bisexuality.

“I’d like to see characters where it isn’t a phase,” she said. “It’s not someone who is confused either. The way I explain it to people is that I’m attracted to a person, not a gender, and that’s what I’d like to see someone get right for a change.”

We’re with you on that, Rakefet.